Hi Mark
That’s what I did. I bought 2 Dell i7’s. Unfortunately you do need a pc and mac licence to do cross platform which was a bit of drag but buying PC’s as you know is quite a bit cheaper than a couple of Mac pro’s I own a mac licence and a pc licence. With either, you can install the network renderer on as many machines as you want I think. Up to 10 for sure. So, in the end, it was cheaper to buy 2 licence’s for AE, one windows and one mac. With that setup I can actually work on PC to compose as well as the Mac.
Cheers
chris